This invention relates to the art of brewing beer, champagne, and other alcoholic beverages, and in particular to bottle closures for collecting and removing solid sediment particles from a liquid being fermented in situ in a bottle to form an alcoholic beverage.
Home-brewing of beer and other bottle-conditioned alcoholic beverages, i.e., beverages which are fermented, aged and naturally carbonated in the bottle, is a long-established and well known art. In the fermentation process used in preparing such beverages, a sediment (e.g., yeast particles) settles at the bottom of the bottle. In order to remove this sediment, which is necessary to properly clarify the liquid, various methods have heretofore been employed.
In the case of champagne making, for example, the bottle is usually inverted or turned upside down to allow the sediment to collect in the tip region of the neck of the bottle. The bottle neck is then placed in a freezing brine solution until the liquid in the tip region is frozen solid. The bottle is then warmed slightly to loosen the frozen sediment plug, after which the bottle cap is removed and the pressure of the natural carbonation blows the sediment plug out of the bottle. The bottle is then recapped. This method, however, is complicated and time-consuming.
In the case of home-brewed beer, by way of another example, if the sediment has not yet been removed at the time the beer is to be consumed, the beer is poured carefully into a glass in one motion until the sediment begins moving from the bottom of the bottle. A problem with this approach is that it is aesthetically undesirable to drink or to serve guests a beverage which has an unappetizing deposit sitting on the bottom of the bottle or which has become turbid in the glass as the liquid was being poured into the glass. To avoid this possibility, it is necessary to handle the bottle very carefully so as not to agitate the liquid and stir up the sediment, but that requires a great deal of concentration as well as a steady hand and is also very slow.
Still further, some more sophisticated home-brewers have adopted the method, usually used by commercial breweries, of filtering the brew. Unfortunately, however, filtration removes flavor constituents of the brew along with the yeast and also shortens the shelf life of beer.
Various attempts to overcome and avoid these problems have been made in the past. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 1,865,023, U.S. Pat. No. 1,892,884, U.S. Pat. No. 2,139,961, U.S. Pat. No. 3,856,169, U.S. Pat. No. 4,947,737 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,932,543 and German Patent No. 3,821,512, all disclose various types of bottle closures designed for use in cases where the bottle is stored in an inverted or upside down state during the fermentation stage. All of these bottle closures, however, suffer from one or more of a variety of drawbacks. Many are provided with various types of valve-like devices to seal off the accumulated sediment particles in the cork or stopper and thus are relatively complex structures, the more so where they are designed for reuse and thus necessitate frequent cleaning and maintenance.
Moreover, in these known arrangements access to the sediment-containing parts of the cork or stopper requires the yeast particles, as they settle from the liquid in the inverted bottle into the cork or stopper thereof, to pass one or more generally transverse surfaces (i.e., surfaces which are not substantially vertical) which to some extent constitute obstructions to the path of movement of the settling yeast particles. Here it must be understood that the nature of a flocculating yeast sediment is such that as it is settling through the liquid it will accumulate on anything in its path which is not a vertical or almost vertical surface. As the result of such a sediment buildup, therefore, those portions of the sediment which have come to rest on the obstructive surfaces within the stopper and have not reached the bottom of the trap section of the stopper and have not been removed from the stopper will end up falling off those surfaces and being returned into the beverage when the bottle is returned to its upright state and thus will make the liquid turbid and will nullify the benefit of collecting the sediment in the stopper.
Yet another sediment-removing system utilizing an inverted bottle arrangement for the fermentation stage is disclosed in U.K. Pat. No. 2,219,307. In this system, during the fermentation stage a smaller bottle for receiving the sediment is suspended from an inverted larger bottle through the intermediary of a flexible tube which is connected to two terminal connectors that are in turn screwed onto the respective necks of the two bottles. The system is disadvantageous, however, in several respects. One disadvantage is that the junctions between the flexible tube and the bottle necks are subject, by virtue of the internal pressure rise due to the fermentation process and by virtue of the weight of the lower bottle and its contents, to leakage unless appropriate countermeasures (for example, the patent mentions the provision of clips where the tube joins the connectors) are taken. Another disadvantage is that the disconnection of the smaller bottle from the larger one at the end of the fermentation stage is time-consuming and cumbersome, in that first the larger bottle must be raised from its storage rack together with the smaller bottle and must then be restored to its upright state by folding the flexible tube while the smaller bottle remains upright, at which point the tube and its connectors must be disconnected from the bottles to permit the larger one to be capped and the smaller one to be cleaned out. Still another disadvantage is that each fermentation cycle results in an economic loss, in that a considerable amount of the fermenting liquid originally contained in the larger bottle (an amount essentially equal to the volume of the smaller bottle plus about one half the volume of the flexible tube) has to be dispensed and is lost with the sediment.
Other approaches have been suggested for carrying out "in the bottle" fermentations while the bottles are stored in an upright state. Such approaches have entailed the provision of sediment traps at the bottoms of the bottles, as is disclosed, by way of example, in U.S. Pat. No. 1,744,947 and U.S. Pat. No. 2,779,472. Bottles of this type are expensive and difficult to manufacture, however, and are highly susceptible to breakage in the regions of the traps.